


feeling like the fourteenth century

by mercuryhatter



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 14th Century, Crowley Hates the 14th Century (Good Omens), Gen, Hell, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Witch Burning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:54:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21566635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: “Crowley,” he said, or something close to it, and felt Crowley’s hands still on either side of his face. After a few moments of their presence his throat felt soothed enough to continue. “Was I burned for heresy?”“Uh,” Crowley said. “Yes?”
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 31
Kudos: 413





	1. Chapter 1

There had been a body once, Aziraphale thought. It had pulsed and breathed and held together like any other, he was sure. Almost sure. Maybe not. He’d been wrong before– probably. Maybe he hadn’t been.**  
**

It was just that it was so hard to think. He felt like he’d been ironed out and then pulled to pieces like a boll of cotton under nervous fingers. His fibers were scattered and between them, either void or pain– it was so hard to think. 

Sometimes he thought he felt a memory of skin or bone, and he had the distant idea that maybe that was good, but it was also unbearable, and so he tried not to. 

–

Someone was singing in Old Occitan. Aziraphale remembered for a minute what it felt like to breathe, even heard the rush of air into his lungs. The singing stopped, and he drifted apart again. 

–

Aziraphale had nerves again, and they were in flames. His hands were tied– no, held down, by other hands that were almost painfully cold on his skin. They felt slender, like he should be able to break the grip easily, but he was finding very quickly that nothing was easy, and also that his aimless writhing was getting him nowhere, and finally that the hands felt familiar. With a divine level of effort, he stilled himself and opened his eyes. 

“Oh,” an equally familiar voice said above him, tremulous with relief. “Okay. Good. Hi.” 

“Hmm,” was the closest Aziraphale could get to responding to that. He was embarrassingly relieved to see Crowley’s sunflower-yellow eyes, and closed his own so that he didn’t have to feel the full force of that emotion. He felt Crowley’s hands leave his wrists and flit to various other parts of his body, touching ribs, shoulders, face. Now that the initial violence of coming to consciousness had passed they felt close to soothing. He also thought Crowley might be doing something extra with them– he’d seen Crowley surreptitiously heal everything from bees to small children when he thought he could get away with it, or when he was doing Aziraphale’s job. 

His job–

“Crowley,” he said, or something close to it, and felt Crowley’s hands still on either side of his face. After a few moments of their presence his throat felt soothed enough to continue. “Was I _burned for heresy_?”

“Uh,” Crowley said. “Yes?” 

Aziraphale looked so offended, even through healing burns, that Crowley fell into helpless giggles next to him, covering his face with both hands. His shoulders were shaking such that Aziraphale suspected more than laughter was going on behind those hands, but thought now was likely not the time to call him on it. He looked a mess, which was unlike him: hair tugged to the side in a loose and messy tail, face unwashed, wearing just his shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows. Aziraphale hadn’t even seen him without his smoky quartz glasses since 1132. He let his eyes close again while Crowley got it all out, opening them again when he felt Crowley’s touch return to his shoulders. 

“Big storm opened up right after they put you on the pyre,” Crowley was explaining. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and cheekbones as he worked on Aziraphale, and Aziraphale wondered if he had ever done this much healing before. “Meant that no one really wanted to stick around for the show, so I pulled you off, flew you out here. That was, uhh, four days ago?” He was starting to sound embarrassed. “I guess I didn’t have to, you would have been back, but it didn’t seem right, I– ugh. I dunno how I’m going to explain this one. This whole blessed century, I don’t know–” 

Aziraphale moved his hand enough to slide it into Crowley’s where it lingered on his hip. Crowley’s nervous babble stopped and Aziraphale held his hand until he felt the fine tremble in it still. 

“Thank you.” 

“Dunmentionit,” Crowley mumbled, then hunched in on himself, covering his face again with his free hand. “I–” He started shaking again, this time diffused through his whole body. “I– nnn.” 

“I’m going back to sleep” Aziraphale said. “Come sleep.” 

“But you–” 

“My dear. Come sleep.” 

Crowley let out a gust of breath and curled up, snakelike, next to Aziraphale. Crowley didn’t attempt to let go of Aziraphale’s hand and so Aziraphale didn’t either.

–

The next time Aziraphale woke up, he felt almost entirely whole, though still with a dull ache in every cell. But he could move and the parts of his skin he could see looked clear of all but scabbing. Crowley must have been at it again while he slept, and now looked arguably worse than Aziraphale, pale and sticky where he was curled in a nest of blankets. His breath came shallowly and his eyes looked bruised, but Aziraphale could feel that it was nothing but fatigue. He stretched experimentally, and upon finding that alleviated his aches, eventually walked a few times around the room. It was a one-room cottage, the foothills of some mountain range visible through the windows. He opened one, filling the room with dewy morning air, and then blinked at the basin in the corner, giving a small, pleased smile when it filled obligingly with water. So everything was all right, then. 

Crowley didn’t wake or even stir when Aziraphale disentangled him enough from the blankets to move his head to Aziraphale’s lap. He didn’t have Crowley’s talent with original song, but he hummed to the rhythm of his hands as he moved them through the tangles of Crowley’s hair, first freeing and vanishing the ribbon holding it back, then combing it through with the water until it softened into clean waves. Crowley’s breath deepened and the tension in his shoulders and neck softened as Aziraphale worked. When he had finished with the hair he moved to Crowley’s face and neck, then gently returned his head to the blanket nest he had built himself. Aziraphale took in the renewed color in Crowley’s face and the newly relaxed slack of his mouth with satisfaction, arranged the blankets more comfortably around him, and went out for a walk. 

When he returned, the cottage was empty and smelled overwhelmingly of brimstone. If Aziraphale had any doubts about what could have happened, they were dispelled by the scorch marks on the walls and a few twitching maggots still strewn across the floor. 

“Oh,” he breathed to himself, leaning heavily on the doorframe. Regret and a fear that he did not want to examine settled deeply in his throat, and he shut the door quietly behind him. 

–

Thirty-eight years later, Aziraphale felt a familiar presence settle in next to him and released a sigh of relief he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding in. He turned to beam at Crowley, and the touch of their hands below the table where Aziraphale had been painting was barely perceptible. 

“Oh, welcome back, dear,” he said fervently, folding an “-est” back down inside himself in recognition of the new fear that tightened the corners of Crowley’s mouth. Crowley smiled at Aziraphale, dissipating the fear just a little. Aziraphale wished he could see Crowley’s eyes, but they were inscrutable behind polished stone lenses. Still, the smile under them was almost enough.

“Hey, angel, long time no see,” he said, and Aziraphale nearly had to close his eyes at the balm of his voice. 

“Darling, I was just thinking of going east. Things have hardly improved here and I hear they’re doing fascinating things with fermented rice in Japan.”

“Well, I can hardly let you go off on your own,” Crowley said. “Wiles and all.”

“Precisely. Shall we?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that would be great.” Crowley slipped his hand into Aziraphale’s offered arm and let Aziraphale pull him out into the summer sun.


	2. Chapter 2

It was inevitable, really; probably should have happened even sooner than it did. Everyone in Carcassonne was on edge-- the flavor of the century, it was beginning to appear, was going to be witches, where “witches” meant anyone the clergy in Avignon (or anywhere else) thought was a problem. Aziraphale’s schtick for the past thirty years or so had involved a lot of healing illness and inducing crops to grow, and he of course rarely pinged anyone’s radar exactly as an upstanding member of the institution, a fact that Crowley normally rated positively on a scale from mildly hilarious to actively admirable. In this case, however, he was mostly just feeling a thin veneer of annoyance that he’d hastily put up over his feelings of more genuine concern and the very un-demonic desire to not see his friend hurt and subsequently discorporated, and further subsequently not see him at all for several decades while he obtained a new body. 

Besides, Crowley liked Aziraphale’s body _now_. It was a nice shape with a nice face and it didn’t deserve to be melted down to a screaming puddle of goo just because some human Catholics got fussy. And thwarting fussy Catholics was a reasonably demonic thing to be doing. If they had no idea that they were being thwarted because Crowley pulled Aziraphale off the pyre after they had all run from the sudden rainstorm that he also definitely had nothing to do with, that was hardly Crowley’s fault. They should be more observant! 

Crowley hadn’t quite gotten to justifying why he hauled said thwarting effort across ten miles of pasture to a shepherd’s cottage and spent four grueling days putting all of his cells back together, but he figured there would be time for that when he had more than three percent of his brain available to him. Right now it was all focused on keeping Aziraphale inside his half-melted corporation. 

He would have let a human go after the second day, and it would have been the kind thing to do. But Aziraphale was an angel, and Crowley knew from personal experience that those of angelic stock could survive this kind of pain just as long as Crowley could keep his body suitable to inhabit. 

Perhaps “torturing an angel” would work if he ended up having to explain himself.

When Crowley got too tired to keep urging Aziraphale’s skin to regrow itself or coax new nerve endings into existence he would lay on the floor with Aziraphale’s head on his thigh and make up songs, a skill he’d picked up as a  _ trobador _ in Aquitaine the previous century. He sang Aziraphale innocuous court dramas and aristocratic biographies until his vision stopped swimming and his hands stopped shaking, and then he’d roll up to a seated position and start again. 

Once on the third day, Aziraphale seemed on the point of waking up, his small gasp jerking Crowley to seated as if it had the physical force to do so. Crowley repeated Aziraphale’s name, touching the soft regrowth of hair on his head with one hand and cradling his jaw with the other, but Aziraphale subsided almost immediately. 

Crowley swore quietly and flopped down alongside Aziraphale, facedown in blankets. He wished he could say he couldn’t remember the last time he had been this exhausted, but the problem was that he  _ could _ , and it was far too recently. He was beginning to think he wasn’t going to like this century very much, if the headache hammering behind his eyeballs was anything to go by. 

“If you don’t get it together soon I’m leaving you here to get an infection and die,” he muttered to Aziraphale’s unconscious form, but the threat sounded hollow even to him. 

\--

It wasn’t until Aziraphale was awake and whole that Crowley really began to consider the implications of what he’d done. Even explaining himself to Aziraphale, naturally the most receptive audience for Crowley’s recent actions, called down a panic on him that Crowley was struggling to hold back. He had used so much power in the past four days and had absolutely no paperwork to justify it, wasn’t even sure what sort of justification he would even be able to come up with before someone popped up on a flaming black horse and demanded it from him. He let Aziraphale soothe him into sleep only because the angel looked so blessed concerned about it, but within an hour he was awake again and working on Aziraphale just to give himself something to do other than think about how much of an idiot he was. After all, it was hardly as if he could get himself into more trouble at this point-- he might as well make sure that his colossal personal mistake had its intended outcome. 

He flagged quickly, though, and couldn’t focus, so put his nervous energy into pacing for a while, and eventually into having a good old-fashioned panic attack in a corner. By the time he had successfully convinced his body that it didn’t actually need to breathe, much less hyperventilate, unconsciousness seemed like a far better option. 

And it was, for a while; Crowley couldn’t remember such a peaceful sleep in a long time, though he wasn’t sure why. The wake up call, though, left a  _ lot _ to be desired. 

“ _ Crawly _ .” The growl was loud enough to shake the walls of the cottage and the bones of Crowley’s body, jarring him unpleasantly awake. The unpleasantness only deepened when he opened his eyes to the looming, approximately-human forms of Hastur and Ligur. 

“‘S Cr _ ohh _ ley now,” Ligur pointed out to Hastur, who scowled and squinted at his paperwork.

“Right,” he said. “Crowley. Some suspicious activity on your part’s been reported and we’re here to audit you.” 

“Uh,” Crowley said intelligently. 

“Well, technic’lly we’re here to take you back to Hell and  _ then  _ audit you,” Ligur said. 

“Uh,” Crowley said again, his sleep-fogged brain struggling to catch up, and then, “oh-- oh! Right, sorry, listen guys, I know I’m behind on my reports but just give me a couple days and I can get them written right up for you--” 

“I don’t think any reports are gonna resolve this one, Crowley,” Ligur said doubtfully. “Kinda big discrepancies here, huh, Hastur?”

“ _ Big _ ones,” Hastur confirmed with a nasty smile. 

Crowleye scrambled to his feet, edging away from Hastur and Ligur to little effect, as they just loomed even more aggressively the farther away he got. 

“Right, discrepancies, yeah, I can explain that,” he said rapidly. “Uh, see, there were these Catholics--” 

“Was it the Catholics made you spend a decade’s worth of miraclin’ on an angel?” Hastur sneered. Crowley, who saw an opportunity when it was handed to him on a smelly sulfurous plate, latched on. 

“Yeah, absolutely! Yes, completely brainwashed, barely got away, all them and the angel’s fault. Real downer, but I’m free now, can go right back to wiling and spreading His Dark Will and all that--” 

“Nah,” Ligur said slowly. He’d been amusing himself flicking tiny fireballs at bugs on the walls of the cottage, but he stopped and looked up now. “Nah, I think this counts as an unacceptable oversight, ‘ccording to the paperwork, don’t you, Hastur?” 

“Think so,” Hastur agreed. “No talking your way out of this one, Crowley.” 

“Right,” Crowley said weakly. “Right, okay, so--”

“So we’re going,” Hastur said, and with a snap of his fingers, vaporized Crowley’s favorite shape into something much less Euclidean and much more wiggly. A void ringed by flames opened in the floor, and Hastur and Ligur nudged the pile of maggots and demonic essence into it before descending themselves. 

\--

It was a long thirty-eight years of goblets of lava, cleaning up after imps, and doing all of Hastur’s overdue timesheets, but Hell eventually satisfied itself with Crowley and spat him back up right where they had taken him. Crowley spent a not-insubstantial amount of time laying there in the grass where the shepherd’s cottage had been, breathing air that didn’t smell like brimstone and soaking up sunshine that didn’t burn his skin-- not to mention enjoying the sensation of having skin again. His second priority was finding Aziraphale. If he had put this much into keeping Aziraphale on this plane of existence he had to be sure that the idiot had taken advantage of it. 

It turned out to be easy to find him, painting bestiaries in Avignon. Even easier was the brush of their hands, the balm of his voice. Crowley promised himself at the first “darling”-- he wasn’t going to lose this again. Not this century. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it was physically painful for me to keep this as repressed I felt like it had to be to stay in character. I just need everyone here to know that I absolutely wanted them to make out for an hour and artistic integrity wouldn't let me


End file.
